three sixty
by asperitas
Summary: Somewhere, there's a stolen halo. He used to watch her wear it well. —modern!au, cobra/kinana. for Marcy.


**title:** three sixty  
><strong>summary: <strong>Somewhere, there's a stolen halo. He used to watch her wear it well. —modern!au, cobra/kinana.

**dedication:** for _**bittersweetsonata**_, who was promised angsty!cobra ten years ago or something.  
><strong>notes:<strong> I've re-written this thing like _five times and it's refusing to cooperate so **fuck it**_.  
><strong>notes2:<strong> this one is (overly) close to my heart. be gentle.

* * *

><p><strong>three sixty<strong>

x

_darling, you're my rugged heart;_  
><em>you're the pulse that I've <span>always<span> needed._

x

( o1 )  
><strong>handfuls of smoke<strong>

x

Kinana squints up, and wonders why he's gritting his teeth. "...Hey— "

"Shut up. Don't speak."

He clutches her hand so tight it hurts (or at least, she _thinks_ it does, 'cause right now her whole body's screaming and she can't really tell)—

— and her blood is smeared on his cheek, and maybe it's just because of that... but for such a tan guy, he's looking deathly pale, and it's kind of freaking her out. "You know I'm g-gonna be okay, right?"

His voice breaks when he tells her that of course he knows, so she needs to stop talking.

His tiny grimace blinds her because it holds more pain than should be possible, she's never seen him like this _and she never wanted to see him like this_. "Don't cry," she whispers, reaching up to — well, she_ doesn't know,_ but she wants to feel the heat of his skin and she's suddenly scared she won't ever have another chance to.

The fingers that trap hers are trembling. "I said," he hisses, touching the sensitive pad of her index finger to his lips, "_shut up_."

If her life wasn't leaking out of her onto the road, she might have laughed.

x

"I _am_ her fucking family, don't you get it? That's what I am, I'm her family, I should be in there _with her_, damn it!"

"I understand that, sir, but —"

"No, no goddamn _buts!_" Angel places a hand on his arm, trying to tell him to lower his voice, desperate to give him support, offer her condolences, remind him that he's not as alone as he thinks he is — but he violently shakes her off and continues to shout at the surgeon. "Look, I'm all she's— she's _got_, okay?" He runs his hand, flaked with Kinana's blood, through his hair — "_fuck's sake_" — and his perpetually narrowed eyes are wide, beseeching, imploring this _one man_ to understand that he absolutely _has to see her_. "I need to be in there with her. She needs me to be there, she's all alone. You've got to let me see her. You _need_ to let me in."

Angel's never seen him like this and it's scaring the living shit out of her, but the doctor looks calm, and it makes her stomach twist with some sick combination of fury and despair. Even Cobra has to see there's just no _chance _he'll be allowed inside, that he's digging for something that isn't _there_—

"I'm sorry. Really," — and Angel believes the guy, she can see the pity in his eyes, and it just makes it all so much worse — "but there's nothing I can do."

When Cobra snaps out of his frozen state — because it's like she can hear what he's thinking: what's he supposed to do if she's not okay, _what the hell is he meant to do? _— he and Angel are alone again, and to her, seeing the fight leave his eyes is worse than watching Kinana's body shatter against the concrete a hundred times over.

Because everyone knows that Angel's always been selfish, and to her, losing her only friend (her _best_ friend) to grief is the worst nightmare, but—

_and it suddenly hits her that he's living it, but its worse because Kinana was always so much more_

— Angel pretends she can't see how his body shudders when he sobs. She swallows down her own emotions _(because she has no right to cry right now _— oh, what was that about selfish?_)_ and instead makes the silent decision to listen as her best friend

falls

_apart._

x

She finds him biting a cigarette in an alleyway near the hospital, leaning carelessly against the bricks, staring at the stars.

"Cobra?"

"Nn?"

Angel twists her hands behind her back, biting her lip as she frowns at him. In the end, she's not brave enough to ask (because everyone knows Angel's always been a coward). "...Bum me a smoke?"

He wordlessly reaches into his back pocket and tosses her the pack. It's almost empty (_how long has he been out here?_) and she rolls her eyes as she takes the last one, throwing the empty box behind a nearby dumpster.

x

He blows smoke out slowly, savouring the burn as the heat leaves his lungs. The night air is bracing, _just cold enough_ to be uncomfortable. It makes him want to grin — _everything_ makes him want to grin, he's in that kind of mood and he's been out here alone far too long to care.

The thought warrants a slight shake of the head.

"What?" Angel asks, a little too quickly.

He shrugs non-committally, and goes back to stargazing — well, what he can salvage through the city's invisible glare.

x

Angel lights up carefully, watching him all the while. His usual stoic demeanour is back, but it's so much worse; deeper eyes in his natural scowl, a bitterness to the way the corners of his lips turn down, a freezing apathy veiling his gaze. He's always been handsome, but right now— no, _from_ now on, looking at him frightens her a little.

She bites her lip again. "H-How...I mean, is she—..." _Ah, shit. She's not doing this right at all_. The question hangs in the frigid air. Did he even hear her?

Just when she's starting to think he didn't and is thankful for it, his gaze catches her own, freezing her hand halfway to her mouth. His expression is cold, and something heavy settles in her stomach. She wants to run away just for letting the question slip (because _hell yes, _she's a coward)—

"Comatose. That's all they'll tell me." He startles Angel by tossing his smoked-out butt to the opposite wall. They both spend a quiet moment watching the red end fizz out into a dull grey ash. "Come on." He suddenly grabs her wrist, and wrenches her forward.

She lets him pull her along into the darker gutters of the city, cigarette limp in her fingers, desperately wishing she had done more to help him, knowing beyond doubt that she'll never have a chance to again.

x

( o2 )  
><strong>watching, blazing, burning<strong>

x

There is a tattoo of a snake on Kinana's wrist, intricate and tiny, but she doesn't know what it means, and she feels like it's watching her.

As as much as Makarov disagrees, insisting that her memory is something once lost and forever irrecoverable — and she knows he just wants what's best for her, and she _knows _he just wants her to be happy—

_But._

The stain of who she was supposed to be is in her skin. The girl she is now is defined through her amnesia, and in the darkness of her apartment at 3am, she will still stare at her wrist and wonder if there is someone out there with the same ink on theirs.

x

It has been two years, and Cobra is an expert on self-destruction.

Angel joins in, for the _fun_ of it.

In an attempt to push him over the edge, one day she burns the inside of his left wrist. She wants to infuriate him. She wants him _angry_. She wants him shattered and sobbing and a mess on the floor, nothing but a pile of jagged, hopeless, pathetic little pieces _— _at least then, she'd have a chance at putting the bastard _back together—_

But it backfires, and her best friend takes the match from her fingers, and finishes the job himself.

x

It has been three years, and Kinana is happy.

— she _thinks_.

She can't help feel she's missing something — _well, duh, that would be who she was before she fell out of a four storey building —_ because it's just been three years of weekly appointments and non-stop therapy and a million promises of a 'slow, steady recovery' (whatever the hell _that_ is), and Mirajane will still walk in on her stuttering with a sadness she doesn't understand.

x

It has been four years, and sometimes Cobra loses himself.

Angel has watched as alcohol devoured what innocence he had left, as the street-fights and bar-brawls became a regular thing; she watched (and held on) as he sunk into an underworld of drugs and death. And maybe she let him pull her with him (or maybe she ran ahead of him because Lord knows Angel has her own demons) but whatever, who cares, because he never did go back to the hospital in the end.

She never asked him why he didn't. It wasn't like she ever_ had to ask_.

And whenever she passes a random woman with messy hair leaving his apartment, something inside her aches (_because her best friend's never been the same since he left his girl behind_). The one night he was drunk enough to try sleep with _her_, she slapped him so hard he saw stars, before cackling to herself and crying at the same time, mumbling something about how he was ruining himself.

What killed her was his responsive silence; as if he knew the truth that was destroying them both _— _that without Kinana, there really wasn't anything left worth saving.

x

Five years later, he walks into a bar, glass shatters to his left, his eyes follow the noise instinctively—

_...and oh god, it's_—

and he's done for.

x

( o3 )  
><strong>scattering the ashes <strong>

x

Kinana isn't sure how to feel about inviting a stranger into her apartment, but that begs the question: is he even a stranger?

She steals another sideways glance at him as she unlocks the door (— he must have noticed by now, she's done it countless times through the night —), and he looks the same as he did before— that is, the same as he did earlier that night.

Because she hasn't remembered a thing. Even though she _knows_ she knows him, she recognises his damn _smell_ for crying out loud, she doesn't know why or how or even who he is, so yeah. She's a little emotional right now. Sue her.

But the moment she's locked the door behind them, he pins her wrists to the wall and just stares into her eyes as if he's looking for something, like he's expecting _something_ to be there. And the way his lips attack her — _devour_ _her_ — is as foreign to her as the heat spreading through her body, but she doesn't stop him — _as if she had the power to do that, as if she'd want to_ — and instead, she pushes him further. She's the one who drags him to the bedroom and she's the one who moans for more, but _l__ord_, the man knows what he was doing.

Her breath stutters, her heart is a drumbeat; she finds herself giggling when his hair tickles her chin, and the tiny smirk that finds its way to his face makes her want to cry (_'cause she's happy, so, so happy, and she doesn't even know why_). And the way he says her name—

the way he _moans it like a prayer _makes her wonder—

oh, it just makes her _wonder_.

x

She is warm in his arms. She doesn't know his name.

Something burns in the hollow of his chest, in the corners of his eyes, along every inch of his skin connected to hers — the pain is palpable, very real, almost a friction between them; and Cobra would be lying if he said he'd ever felt more alive.

x

Because later, with his arm thrown across her waist, she notices the dark spiral of a snake tattooed against his wrist — a little scarred, a little twisted. And it's only once he's fallen asleep, once the scowl has truly fallen from his face, that Kinana recognises the man for who he is to her.

She realises what he smells of — and that is _safety_.

x

For the first time in a few years, Angel's best friend actually picks up her call.

She's surprised enough to forget what she wanted to ask, so that when he tells her where he is, it's the most she can do to pretend the choked-up tears are just bitter, she's just _jealous_, — because Angel's just selfish like that, you see. His 'thank-you's sound rougher than they should, and she hangs up before he can make her cry any more.

She'll have to plan a welcome-back party later, damn it.

x

Kinana watches him. He's sitting beside her, shirtless, smoking carelessly, watching the grey plumes fade into the air, and she would be lying if it didn't take effort to stop herself from jumping him again. The words leave her lips before she can stop them— "I wish I could remember."

His gaze slides to her, and she's startled by the way he looks at her, as if she's_ his most important_ person. His right foot rests on the bed, his forearm leaning on his knee; she'd be impressed if anyone could look sexier sporting that bed-head and those sleep-hazy eyes."...Really?" he asks her eventually, before taking another long drag and forcing his eyes away from her — and _lord_, she loves how hard he has to work to do it

"Don't you?"

He shrugs, and the_ way_ his muscles tense when he does that— _No, for the love of god, stop it! _and she tries to focus on his words. "I don't like to dwell on what-ifs."

The vulnerability in his voice makes her feel warm, creating a burning urge within her to hug him, to hold him. So she does. But the fact that he doesn't even look surprised at the contact just feeds her curiosity, and she just can't _help_ herself— "Were we lovers?"

And he laughs, something she suspects he doesn't do very often because it's clumsy and husky (_and yeah, she'll admit it, he's adorable when he smiles_). He shakes his head at her, and his hand wraps around her waist like it's second nature, and she doesn't know that to him, it just might be. And now his expression is devilish, filling her with heat and anticipation, and she doesn't know if the feelings belong to her or her lost memory, but it's her, right now, whose face is red and she knows it, _oh god_. "That wasn't what I— god, _no, _I didn't—"

He cuts her off with a kiss, and through the sweet, soft pain, she decides to let him get away with tasting like ashes — _for now._

x

**{ end }**


End file.
